Jogging with a purpose: How plogging is quietly cleaning up N.B. trails

Phyllis and John Holmes have been walking the streets of Hampton since Thanksgiving weekend 2005 — bags in hand, picking up what does not belong.

Whether it was a coffee cup, cigarette butt, a fast food wrapper or crushed beer can — whatever the day brought, they picked it up.

“We were joggers,” Phyllis said. “We used to run on top of litter — and I would be walking over the litter. So one day I thought, why don’t I just pick it up as I’m walking.”

John fashioned himself a stick with a nail at the end. Phyllis grabbed a pair of kitchen tongs.

Word spread quickly in Hampton, about 38 kilometres northeast of Saint John. The manager of the local Home Hardware saw them one day and asked how they were managing for bags — and donated a box of 100.

“As of today, we are up to 9,153 bags that we have picked up so far,” she said.

Jogging with a purpose: How plogging is quietly cleaning up N.B. trails and communities

“So I said why don’t you put receptacles around the town,” Phyllis recalled. "At the end of 2008 they put receptacles in."

“I know they’re using them,” Phyllis said of the town bins. “Because I often have to call the town and remind them that a certain receptacle is overflowing.”

A recent study out of Cape Breton University that included Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is now putting a name to what John and Phyllis Holmes have been quietly doing for decades.

The activity is called plogging. The word itself originated in Sweden in 2016, coined by Erik Ahlström and a blend of the Swedish words for pick up, plogga, and jog, jogga.

Kelsey Harvey, an assistant professor at Cape Breton University and the lead researcher on the study, said that when she started reaching out to participants in New Brunswick, many had never heard the word plogging.

“Well before it was called plogging, especially out here in Atlantic Canada, people used litter cleanup as the phrase of choice,” Harvey said.

“It dispels the myth that it’s a young versus old issue. People of all ages care.”